The Marina Park Pavilion located in Puteri Harbour, Johor was designed as a modernist rectangular “jewel box” to showcase the quality of living spaces within the new master-planned urbanist city. The two shorter ends of the box are colossal billboards for outdoor movies and projection showcasing the development content to be appreciated from both within or from the pleasure of the surrounding lawns.  

To keep the attention of visitors on the exhibits on display, the architecture is kept intentionally simple and muted, defined only by a clean white rectilinear box with a steel framed entrance porte cochere attached. The jewel box contains an internal glass box space and an external hidden conservatory garden with preserved old kayu arang trees directly facing the marina.

Visitors meander through the private garden, with its shrubs and trees that poke past oculi in the roof, to access or simply browse the delicately crafted living and working spaces encased in the glazed envelope. In this way, the jewels of the Marina Park lifestyle become both displays and living samples, and the landscape becomes a transition zone as visitors go from one showpiece to the next, amidst the backdrop of the Tebrau Straits.

At dusk the jewels within the box glitter. Warm lights reveal the rich texture of the teak timber clad ceiling and walls, creating a striking cozy amber contrast to the rest of the structure’s envelope finished in smooth composite white panels. Inside the main exhibition space, a towering scale model of the development stands between the reception counter and the discussion area. A green haven of landscape with trees escaping through its top serves to explain how the development intertwines with nature and ecology.